Over the past decade, enterprises have experienced a substantial increase in the productivity of its workforce when providing them with business mobile devices. In the past, given their high cost, business mobile devices were mainly allocated to management and focused on providing employees with email access and cellular phone capabilities. However, recent improvements in the computing power, mobile display technologies and connection speeds of mobile devices, combined with the continued decreases in hardware costs, have made powerful mobile devices available even to the general public for personal use. More and more individuals personally own powerful mobile devices, such as smartphones, that, in addition to serving as a cellular phone, can be used in many of the same ways as a desktop or a laptop, such as accessing emails, browsing documents or the internet, game playing, listening to audio or viewing a video, and personal information management (PIM).
Due to the above trends in mobile devices, enterprises are currently experiencing an “invasion” of personal devices into the workplace. Given the sophisticated capabilities of their personal mobile devices, employees no longer desire possessing a separate personal and business mobile device and continually pressure information technology (IT) departments to support personal devices brought into the workplace. As such, IT departments struggle to maintain a proper balance between enabling a certain level of access to enterprise data (e.g., such as access to email, contacts, documents, and the like) on personal devices and ensuring adequate security measures to protect corporate intellectual property in such enterprise data. This phenomenon has led enterprises to investigate the viability of a “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) strategy to IT, where a personal mobile device is provisioned by IT departments with the capability of operating as a complete business mobile device in a secure fashion.
Virtualization has been proposed as a solution for consolidating personal and business uses in a single mobile device. With virtualization, personal and work environments remain isolated. As a result, the user need not provide enterprise IT departments any control of the user's personal environment and the enterprise IT departments can retain strict control of the user's work environment. Another important feature of virtualization is that the user's work environment will be platform independent. Regardless of the type of personal mobile device the user chooses, the resulting work mobile device through virtualization will be identical. Therefore, enterprise IT departments need to support only one type of work mobile device.
When a mobile device is provisioned in the manner described above for both personal and work uses, it is not uncommon for the mobile device to encounter memory shortages. For example, the mobile device may have 400 MB of memory and the browser (which may be run in the personal environment on top of an operating system that is consuming about 25 MB of memory or the work environment on top of an operating system that is consuming about 25 MB of memory) may require around 250 MB of memory. Therefore, it would not be possible to partition memory statically to support the browser in both environments. Instead, memory resources will have to be dynamically assigned between the two environments. In addition, mobile device operating systems such as Android®, which support multitasking of applications, divide up memory resources between applications, prioritizing based on user visibility and recency of use. This adds a layer of complexity to any memory management schemes and makes it challenging to ensure that memory resources are divided fairly between the personal and work environments. It should further be noted that memory models of certain operating systems, such as Android®, does not rely entirely on swap but also employs asynchronous process termination. As a result, memory management schemes designed for such operating systems will have to ensure that the important processes are not being terminated prematurely in one environment because of memory pressure in the other environment.